Members of faculty Management Sciences, staff & students.

My Name is Ashfaq Agha, I am retired Captain from the PN. I am most happy to be here with you all today. I want to welcome every one present here this morning.

In particular, I want to welcome our new incoming students. Please join hands together with me to welcome each other.

This is truly a celebration – a celebration of you. I have no intention to deliver a long speech highlighting all good points of the university, but I leave them for you to experience yourself. However, I would like to take the start of the New Semester as an opportunity to reflect our hopes & dreams for the future. And as Director of the Campus I want to share some of my hopes and dreams, for you. I have a feeling that Fall 2007 will be a wonderful semester. To help make useful most of your BU experience, I have chosen to briefly discuss 4 – words – LEARN, ACT, PRIDE/ATTITUDE AND YOU which I think are relevant for the progress and your grooming while you are in the University. First thing I want to emphasis to you is to LEARN. You will learn the excitement, rigors and challenges of your chosen programme through research, lectures, self study, peers an faculty. I think that you will be surprised at the level of expertise that you will gain. You all should LEARN to be the experts, which carries with it pride & responsibilities. Be proud of the excellence you have already achieved and march confidently through your Bahria University academic path. We will learn as much from each other as possible. I think that you are here because you LOVE TO LEARN.

After learning you must perform,

ACT = PERFORM

Perform, in any or all dimensions that you can ACT. I hope that you bring 100% of your enthusiasm for life to our BU community and beyond. But before one can ACT, we usually need to LISTEN. After LISTENING, I recommend THINKING. After listening and thinking, I recommend ACTING. You can act to make the BU community a better place for us all to call home. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, is not solely an act, but a habit.” I urge you to make your habits here at BU to excel. Develop habits that include ACTIONS to better yourself and your community.
Now I come to most important attribute of you personality:

PRIDE/ATTITUDE. I am sure, it is a complex word, sometime it is used in a negative sense – too much pride is looked upon as an arrogance. People with too much pride often fall from grace. Pride is considered as one of the seven deadly sins. I appreciate these connotations but I am not talking here about excessive pride.

I am talking about a different meaning of pride – the positive meaning.

For me, pride is about self-respect and respect for others. It is about the feeling and celebrating the joy in one’s own accomplishments and the accomplishments of others. Pride is a feeling that accompanies success.

• It is an emotion that allows one to rise to heights one might not have anticipated.
• It is an emotion that – once felt – one always wants to feel again (it is much like love in that way).

As some one wrote: Pride is a personal commitment. It is an attitude which separates excellence from average performance.

This is I want you to quest for and be excellent – and that is why I think pride is so important.

Here are my hopes for you that you should strive for.

I hope this coming year will give you many opportunities to be proud of yourself.

I hope you will be proud of your accomplishments in the classroom.

I hope you will be proud of your many achievements outside the classroom – in the athletic field, in educative experiences outside the classroom, in relationships with new and old friends.

I hope you will be proud of the decisions you made and the path both taken and not taken.

But, there is another piece to this:

I also hope that you will be proud of your University – and the faculty and staff within it, and I want you to share your institutional pride with others – your families, your friends and complete outsiders.

And there is yet another part to this which is our responsibility that we have to work to make you proud of us as an institution. We try to do that day in and day out. We take pride in what we do and the education and learning we provide to you –in and out of the classroom. That is my part of commitment to you – to make you proud of the institution that will be awarding you your degree.

I think we can do our part and I think you can do your part.

For all my hopes for you and for us as an institution, one thing is true – pride – and being proud – it does not just comes your way. Pride needs to be earned. You and we have to work for excellence in and out of the classroom. Sometimes it takes courage to move ahead. Sometimes is takes a valiant effort to make progress.

Making us and yourself proud does not mean that everything will always go right. Our making you proud also does not mean you will like every decision we make. It does not mean everything will be easy.

I am proud of Bahria University and its students. For our new students, I am sure you will do yourselves and the institution proud. I hope, too, that as an institution, we will make you proud.

The accomplishment of both of these goals will make us proud.

Not to forget that in all this you are very important. This brings me to the last of my 4 thoughts: Learn, Act, Attitude/Pride and YOU. All of you sitting here are STARS, as brilliant as Mars. You are the best and never forget that, rather, give yourself a pat on the back everyday, You are extraordinary; the things that you have already achieved are astonishing. That’s why YOU are here. We don’t make mistakes in graduate admissions. You all belong here and have the potential to thrive here at BU. BU is a great place to be because of all of you, the students. We are here to celebrate YOU.

In closing, You are all, somebody extremely special and we’re here to welcome you and celebrate with you. I wish you the best in your BU graduate careers. I believe that YOU are the BU generation to open our hearts and minds, to stir this country in right direction, through your LEARNING, ACTING and ATTITUDE / PRIDE.

Thank-you and best wishes to you all.